European Parliament scales back publication of election polls

The European Parliament said it would stop publishing polling data one month before the EU election in May, due to concerns over national election legislation and complaints by parliamentary groups.

In a meeting Tuesday, the bureau — the Parliament's 14 vice presidents and five treasurers responsible for internal procedures – decided to reduce the planned publication of seven polls to two, one of which will be released next Friday. No new data will be made public in the last month before the election.

Marjory van den Broeke, a Parliament spokeswoman,said the decision was made because some member countries have national legislation limiting the publication of polling data before an election. "There are different types of legislation in countries so a month was chosen to do the right thing," she said.

The European Parliament’s decision to publish its own polls has drawn anger from several parties, including the Socialists and Democrats (S&D), the Greens-European Free Alliance, and the liberal ALDE party.

"No other parliament publishes the distribution of political groups prior to an election." — S&D spokeswoman

In February, the Parliament issued a first projection of seats based on national polling data, with the aim of “publishing updated projections every two weeks until the end of April and every week during the month of May until election night itself,” according to a Parliament statement.

After the last polls close on May 26, the assembly also planned to publish initial exit polls “for those countries that conduct them and where voting has finished, from 18.00 and every hour until provisional final results are available from all Member States,” the statement continued.

The Parliament had justified its decision to run seat projections by arguing that “this year’s elections will be the most important in Parliament’s history, given the political context, the envisaged departure of the United Kingdom and major political and cross-border challenges that need to be addressed.”

But the initiative caused outrage among many MEPs who argued that the Parliament, as a neutral institution, was not entitled to publish its own polls and projection of seats.

A S&D spokeswoman said nobody had expected the polls to be made public when the Parliament adopted the idea in its communication strategy.

"No other parliament publishes the distribution of political groups prior to an election,” she said.

Moreover, events such as Brexit and the success of French President Emmanuel Macron's party La République En Marche had added an element of unpredictability to the vote, she said: “We are in a very unstable political context and there might be a lot of changes so it would be better to wait than to anticipate."

She added that because of the Parliament's release of polling data, “we had the impression that the election was already done.”

Only the center-right European People's Party (EPP) — by far the largest bloc with a predicted 181 seats, according to polls — advocated for the publication of seat projections to continue as planned.